These are not travel guides. Travel guides are written by people who visited. These are written by someone who stayed.
I have been coming to Chania since 1971 and living here since 2015. The stories below are drawn from fifty years of Saturday mornings at the farmers market, four hour lunches with friends, early morning walks with Oscar to the lighthouse, and conversations with neighbours who remember this neighbourhood before it became beautiful to outsiders.
Read them before you arrive. They will change how you see the city when you get here.
Food in Crete is more than a way to fill your stomach. It is olive oil pressed from family groves, greens picked wild from the mountains, cheese made by three generations of the same family at the Saturday morning market on Minios Street. It is a four hour lunch that keeps going because someone's grandchildren drop by, and then their children, and at one point you look around the table and realise there are four generations gathered and nobody is in any hurry to be anywhere else.
This is the guide to eating and drinking in Chania that no restaurant association published. It covers the dishes worth knowing, the places worth finding, and the people behind both.
The first time I walked through the Venetian quarter of Chania, something happened that I have been trying to describe ever since. There is a staircase between what was once Venier Palace and the Dolphin Hotel nearby. Most people walk past it without stopping. I stop every time.
Wonderment is the closest word. Standing there, I can sense them: elegantly robed Venetians, descending and ascending, unhurried, in an era when this staircase was the centre of something. The stone has not changed. The proportions have not changed. Only the people have changed, and even that feels uncertain when you are standing in the right place at the right moment.
This is the guide to Chania's Old Town written by someone who bought a house here before anyone else was paying attention.
There is a difference between visiting a neighbourhood and living in one. Visitors see the architecture. Residents know the neighbours.
Sue appears at her window when I call her name. Kyria Maria walks past my door every morning nattering to herself with extraordinary humour and even more extraordinary energy. Kyria Katerina used to sit outside the house she grew up in every day until she could not anymore. Rena managed her hotel at 98. Her sister Ioanna collected marble artifacts rescued from a 17th century mosque and displayed them quietly in a hotel corridor in Halepa.
These are the people of Splantzia. This is their story, and mine.
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Chania has given me fifty years of material. I am still writing.
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[IMAGE P4.5: A photograph taken from the lighthouse breakwater looking back at Chania. The harbour, the minaret, the White Mountains in the background. Late afternoon or early evening light.]